


How to Successfully Keep Your Dead Best Friend in a Safe Location all the while Utilizing a Fairly Useless Storage Space

by bluerosele



Category: Shaun of the Dead
Genre: Gen, Liz deals with a lot, Nightmares, Post Z-Day, Zombies, comforting zombies, too many zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 10:02:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3973963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluerosele/pseuds/bluerosele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, If You Feed Him Shaun He'll Keep Coming Back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Successfully Keep Your Dead Best Friend in a Safe Location all the while Utilizing a Fairly Useless Storage Space

Shaun doesn’t smile anymore. 

Which, in some odd way, comforts Liz with a nostalgic semblance of how things used to be. It’s not fair to Shaun, and she doesn’t want it to stay this way. 

It’s just, as far as reassurances and attempts at cheering up someone nowadays, everyone’s just being hypocritical with everyone else. There’s no point in it. They all call each other out and it’s all good and fair because each person deserves to be called out on trying to assert some sort of comfort greater than what they’ve also been through. The world is all survivors now. They’re interconnected in this corresponding pervasive disaster. 

But as for Shaun not smiling, it almost makes Liz want to break the new unspoken Number One Rule and make him stop. 

Luckily for Liz though, it doesn't have to be her. 

It takes one night, Shaun wandering back to the Winchester, asking for help, and somehow reanimating Ed. 

And, okay, right reanimation isn’t all it used to be, quite common now actually, makes more sense. But there’d been a counterattack, a quarantine, and Ed, resilient though he may be, shouldn’t have survived. Or, dead survived. 

Liz had been between sleep and not, where she was just sure of her surroundings as to understand what was happening when it happened, but not wake enough to be able to respond. Shaun was having a nightmare. This wasn’t new, but the extent this one was accelerating to certainly was. He sighed out half screams, contorting around himself, clawing at his skin and sheets and hair. Later, she’d blame the Winchester and early exposure to raw (pun not intended but appreciated) memories. In the moment she didn’t have time to think of what or who was to blame, she was too occupied with trying to comfort or wake up or do absolutely anything to make Shaun stop making those sounds. 

Shaun’s twisting around arching against some unseen onslaught, gathering his pillow tighter to him shielding it, groaning half words and phrases “not you too” and “not like mum” in that voice Liz remembers with crisp certainty. With all hopeless lostness of a scared boy who doesn’t want to do what he has to and can only say “sorry” before he does. 

She shushes and hushes and pleads with him to wake up to please wake up but she’s never been particularly good or persuasive in these situations—whether its choosing the wrong words or sounding more panicked than the person panicking she’s not sure but either way she feels as if she’s made things worse.

Focused so intently on the making of things worse though has her completely unobservant to what’s going on around them. Namely a lumbering mass approaching from behind, advancing slowly but surely. 

When he does get there, Liz is too shocked to scream. She covers Shaun with herself and stays. Shaun fidgets and burrows deeper into himself. Ed stands there, wobbling forewords a little. 

For the most part he seems pretty comfortable with himself and Liz wonders if that’s just Ed in there. Then he reaches foreword. 

Liz expects at least fourteen different things simultaneously but understands making any attempt to divert them would be futile and she is not going to wake up Shaun to see his best friend eat him. She clutches Shaun, turns into his neck and whispers what she should say more often when he’s awake. 

Nothing happens. 

For at least forty five seconds nothing happens and that’s too slow even for a zom—Ze—Ed. One at at time, she opens her eye. 

Ed’s still reaching foreword. He’s got Shaun. And he’s just rubbing his forehead.

Shaun deflates and shifts towards the blotched hand, not for warmth Liz is sure, there can’t be any. Whatever it is though, Liz doesn’t care, because Shaun’s alright now. Shaun's comforted by the hands of his dead friend. Something tight constricts in her chest. 

Shaun's breath hitches (Liz stifles a laugh because she should not be laughing at how bad Dead Ed smells) and he looks up. Ed wobbles a bit, but leaves his hand, looking bored and not unlike himself really at all. For a few moments, Liz does wonder if she should actually get a weapon of some sort instead of sitting here observing Z behaviors, but then Shaun makes a chocked sound and jumps out of the bed to wrap himself around the corpse of his friend. 

Liz puts the kettle on, Shaun wraps Ed in a duvet for no practical reason, and they watch telly. 

They move Ed to the shed the next morning, along with the game console (which Liz would be lying if she said that part of the bargain wasn't her favorite). Shaun doesn't have any more nightmares. Shaun smiles now. 


End file.
